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Todd Matters, RackWare’s co-founder and Chief Architect, has years of technical experience and holds over 10 patents. Prior to RackWare, Todd worked with QLogic and Unisys. He was a co-founder, CTO, and Vice President of Engineering at Infinicom, which was acquired by QLogic in 2006. Matters graduated with honors from Millersville State College with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Mathematics.

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The recent Salesforce outage reminds companies that relying on third-party providers for operations-vital tasks is always a risk. Before downtime strikes, enterprises should create a contingency plan with a hybrid cloud strategy and data backup plan, writes, Todd Matters, RackWare’s co-founder and Chief Architec and Sash Sunkara, co-founder and CEO of RackWare.

CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM (CDP) BUYERS’ GUIDE 2019

Welcome to the 2019 edition of CDP Buyers’ Guide. As customer data platforms are becoming increasingly necessary for enterprise marketers, it is also becoming more complex to choose the best fit CDP platform amongst the pool of new and old vendors.

The outage transpired after a faulty Pardot database script overrode permission settings and allowed all employees to edit and view their company’s data. Concerned about a free-for-all on sensitive business information, Salesforce blocked access for every Pardot user until Salesforce fixed the internal glitch. As a result, thousands of teams temporarily lost access to the data, analytics and contacts they need to do their job.

As more enterprises rely on third-party platforms for sales, communications, payments, and any other enterprise needs, the Salesforce outage is a reminder that no cloud-based software is immune to unplanned downtime. In fact, 91% of data centers experienced an unplanned data center outage in the last two months, according to Data Center Knowledge. If enterprises take the correct steps before a crisis strikes, they can avoid the worst of the damage during a third-party outage.

Common missteps to avoid in an outage

For sellers, marketers and advertisers, any downtime is bad news. But a lack of strategic planning makes it exponentially worse. Here are three common business missteps that heighten the negative impact of downtime:

#1: Forgo a contingency plan. Without an emergency plan, your company runs the risk of monetary costs that quickly spiral out of control. Every minute of unplanned downtime will cost the average company $5,600 per minute of revenue in damage control costs. So needless to say, any time spent waiting to resume work is money down the drain.

Let’s break down the hypothetical scenario that could result in an average-sized company paying $5 million for a 15-hour outage:

Since a plan was never created, the employees never received emergency training. Unsure of how to proceed, they emailed their supervisor for instructions rather than moving forward with the recovery process. To make matters worse, the company forgot to create a backup worksite, so downtime was prolonged until the problem was solved.

#2: Put all your assets in one cloud. In 2019, there’s no reason to endure the workflow delays and security uncertainties of a single cloud approach. If your assets are everything, why risk being left with nothing in the event of an outage?

#3: Forget to back-up your data. Speaking of assets, data is perhaps the most important one. In the event of a crash, your data could be temporarily unavailable, compromised or even stolen. Given 94% of companies never recover from severe data loss, it’s simply not worth the risk.

How can businesses mitigate the risks?

The hypothetical situation mentioned earlier might have been unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean it needed to cost the company $5 million. The best way to avoid excessive monetary costs is to address all risks in a contingency plan that incorporates a hybrid cloud strategy and a data backup solution.

Create a documented, vetted and tested plan that outlines how you will back up the tools your company relies on to prevent costly prolonged downtime. Ensure the plan’s efficiency with regular tests in which gaps are clearly documented to help you identify weaknesses and make improvements.

A major component of any good contingency plan is a hybrid cloud strategy that includes considerations for disparate geographies and cross-cloud providers. Remember to design accessible recovery points into your plan so you can restore a past version of software. The trick will help your team stay productive through an outage — and save your company serious money.

A strong contingency plan isn’t complete without a data backup solution. The process essentially stores a copy of all files and information in a secondary location as a precaution. Unfortunately, a single backup of data won’t cut it. Modern recovery solutions allow for data recovery points, continuous data protection and block-level encryption that helps ensure that critical documents, emails, reports and other information are protected and safe.

The expression ‘time is money’ holds especially true when it comes to a third-party solution outage. Disasters are inevitable, so create a plan to keep your company’s head above water during a crisis. When done correctly, a comprehensive contingency plan that addresses the appropriate risk factors will drastically reduce the consequences of an outage. The process can be extremely technical, so it may be worthwhile to invest in a solution provider to help your company through the transition.

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